Dignity, Justice, and the Nazi Data Debate: On Violating the Violated Anew

Description

In this work, Carol V.A. Quinn (re)constructs the survivors’ arguments in the debate concerning the ethics of using Nazi medical data, showing what it would mean to take their claims seriously. She begins with a historical case and presents arguments that help make sense of the following claims: 1) Using the data harms the survivors by violating their dignity; 2) The survivors are the “living data,” and so when we use the data we use them; 3) The data is really, not merely symbolically, evil and we become morally tainted when we engage it; and 4) The survivors are the real moral experts in this debate, and so we should take seriously what they say. Quinn’s approach is interdisciplinary, incorporating philosophy, psychology, trauma research, survivors’ testimony, Holocaust poetry, literature, and the Hebrew Bible. Preface Introduction Chapter 1: An Overview of the Debate Chapter 2: Kant’s Conception of Dignity and How it Fails to Capture Survivors’ Claims of Harm Chapter 3: On Finding an Adequate Conception of Dignity Chapter 4: Trauma, the Self, and Controlling the Nazi Data Chapter 5: Nazi Data: Transparent, Evil, and Transparently Evil Chapter 6: Epistemic Injustice and the Survivors’ Claims to Moral Expertise Bibliography